Papercuts
by forever-ioand-ever
Summary: He'd heard of these things, of course. The stories of medical legend. They happened once, then were told time and again as a cautionary tale of folklore. Bizarre, obscure toxins responsible for taking life. And bringing it into Henry's morgue. And that anonymous tipster isn't helping things...
1. Chapter 1

_It was only a matter of time now._

_He'd made sure everything was perfect: the timing, the placement, the setting. _

_She'd been so fascinated. So very very fascinated._

_As the dusk began to settle, so did her fate. She seemed to suddenly come down with a terrible cold..._

_Why not stay at my apartment tonight? he offered._

_I promise I'll take care of you._

_You really don't want to have to fend for yourself in this condition._

_You couldn't even get home, sick as you are._

_He was right. She was never going home. And he was never returning to this apartment. Good thing it hadn't been his to begin with..._

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Who do we have here today, Lucas?"

Henry strode into the morgue with the joy and confidence only he could exude in the chamber of the dead on a Monday morning.

"Morning, Doc," Lucas offered with a quick glance up from the clipboard in his hands, then looked back down at the list of newcomers. "NY11-15-2-336 and 37, Traffic accident on 25th, should be pretty cut-and-dry."

Lucas began walking the autopsy suite, motioning to each covered corpse as he rattled off their case number. 336 and 337 both appeared to be males over six feet in height, one of average build, one slightly overweight, and the thinner man's right arm was askew from an injury likely occurring postmortem. And this was Henry's examination _before_ uncovering the corpses.

"11-15-2-338, found by some beat cops in an alley off of 49th,"

Shorter, female, thin but not dangerously thin. Longer legs suggested flexibility and dexterity. If she wasn't a dancer, she should have been.

"They suspect drugs," Lucas continued, adding, "but you'll probably say murder," as a mumbled afterthought.

"And one for you to have fun with, Doc." Lucas declared at the fourth and final occupied slab in the morgue. Henry studied the shape of the body from how it affected the sheet covering it. The corpse also appeared to be female, a larger woman by the standards of Hollywood and the red carpet, but an average body-type to most humans. Her hair was likely thick and curly, the sheet settled about her head suggested so. Nothing physically damaging was visible through the shape of the covering.

Henry gave Lucas a skeptical look.

"11-15-2-339. Found in an apartment in the Lower East Side. No evidence of foul play at first glance. The CSU guys have nothing. She's all yours, Doc."

Lucas flourished his hands toward the corpse, giving Henry a pleading smile. He wanted to see Henry do some medical magic, and Henry could see just that. And as much as he tried to keep Lucas on neutral ground in his life, as he did with everyone, Henry was finding himself growing fond of the boy. Which made it all the more fun to watch him squirm with excitement as they got closer and closer to revealing the cause of death of the perplexing case labeled NY11-15-2-339.

"Why don't we start with 36 and 37? You said it seems quite 'cut-and-dry,' it shan't take us a copious amount of time."

Henry waited not for his assistant's approval or denial of the plan, and began uncovering the corpse assigned 11-15-2-336, who was, as he'd deduced, a six-foot-two male just a twinge on that side of overweight. Various fractures were much more visible with simply the removal of the sheet.

"From the positioning of the neck, it appeared that broken vertebrae had sliced or squeezed the spinal cord, causing interference from the brain to the nervous system, leading to paralysis and a fairly instantaneous death. Lucas, the victim's clothes, if you will?"

Snapping open the scissors, Lucas obediently sliced through the dead man's dressings and slipped the shredded shirt from the corpse's shoulders. As Henry worked on his examination, Lucas worked on the thicker material of the man's heavy denim jeans.

Within thirty minutes, Henry had thoroughly examined the body and remained unmoved from his original diagnosis. He'd unearthed various other bodily damages sustained due to the wreck, and the tox reports were filed for the stomach bile that smelled as equally of acid as it did of liquor.

The other two bodies were a simple cases as had been the first. Death by trauma induced from a motor vehicle crash, high levels of alcohol related to said accident for 337, and intravenous lethal injection of narcotics for 338. Suicide, as evidenced by the victim's fingerprints, and their precise placement around the needle's puncture wound.

"Anyone attempting to make murder appear to be suicide would not have placed the fingers as far apart. A murderer tends to forget that their victim would only have one hand with which to inject themselves, and therefore overcompensate fingerprints as if one hand pulled the skin while the other injected. Of course, there are instances..."

Lucas tapped the table in front of Henry, bringing him out of his esoteric little world of expatiation upon death. The assistant pointed behind him and mouthed something, and as Henry turned to see what exactly had Lucas' attention, his eyes were met with the visual of two detectives entering the glass doors of the morgue.

"Detective Hanson, Detective Martinez, good morning," Henry nodded. Jo took a swig of the coffee held in her right hand, giving the doctor her most annoyed "it's Monday and I don't want to be awake" glare. Henry, his gaze fixed on the cup in her hand, took a step toward her and opened his mouth to reprimand her.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Jo scoffed, licking coffee residue off of her upper lip. "No food or drink, it'll contaminate the bodies."

She reluctantly set the tumbler on a side shelf that looked fairly unimportant, sneaking in another swig of her caffeinated bean delight as Hanson began to ask about the bodies that had come in overnight.

"Especially that one from the apartment by your place, Doc. Lieu wants that cleared up fast as possible, preferably wrapped with a neatly-tied bow."

Hanson leaned his elbow on the corner of the slab, motioning to the covered corpse. Henry looked dubiously to Hanson, then Lucas, then to Jo.

"The landlord's one of the higher ups. Not too great of a reflection on our own, having a suspicious death on our own property. So you see why she's pushing an open-and-shut here, right Doc?"

"Indeed," Henry muttered. "But she should know that I work for truth, not convenience."

"That means it's murder," Jo muttered, finally leaving her coffee and returning to the conversation. She sidled up to Hanson, her eyes fixed on the covered corpse.

"That's what I said about the suicide over there, and it wasn't. Maybe it's our lucky day?" shrugged Lucas.

"Death is not a joking matter," Henry reprimanded. Turning back to Jo and Hanson, he continued, "And as for this case, I haven't even begun my autopsy. With the introduction Lucas gave me and the pressures added by our Lieutenant, I will inevitably be spending at least a few hours on her, perhaps more. Now, if you want this done as quickly as possible, I suggest you leave and allow Lucas and I to begin our work."

The detectives really couldn't argue with that. Three cases with expected results, coming from Henry, were already beyond their expectations. Add in the ME duo getting ready to examine the hottest case in the last three months, it was a recipe for a good Monday. That, and more coffee. Jo grabbed the tumbler as she left and took another swig as soon as the morgue doors closed behind them.

{•*•*•*•*•}

Lucas and Henry stared into the chest cavity, dumbfounded by what stared back at them.

"Did... Did she have a..."

"Yes, Lucas. It appears our victim was victim of a myocardial infarction."

Lucas looked at his mentor, confusion crossing his features.

"Heart attack. What do they teach in medical school these days?" Henry sighed, his hands now deep in the victim's chest as he carefully removed the damaged organ.

"Now, Lucas, what do you know about myocardial infarctions, or in laymans terms, the heart attack?"

Henry held the woman's heart triumphantly in his hand, his blue latex glove covered in blood and other bodily fluids. Lucas shirked back at his boss's casual handling of the organ.

"Um, they're more common in older people... Usually men, so the fact that we have a woman in her twenties here is pretty odd..."

"False." Henry declared, slicing into the cardiac muscles. "Women are in fact more likely to experience myocardial infarctions, and age, though a factor, is irrelevant overall. It is very possible that a young woman such as our victim could have experienced this. What I was getting at were the physical inconsistencies."

"Physical inconsistencies?"

"Her muscular tissue. It shows excessive breakdown, suggesting a muscular disorder. Quite inconsistent with the amount of muscle tissue she appears to have had, thus ruled out. Leaving us with the improbable but not impossible conclusion of poison."

Henry pulled a small syringe from his lab coat and drew a vial of blood from the body. "Send this to toxicology. I believe their answer will give us our murder weapon."

{•*•*•*•*•}

"Coral!"

Jo looked up from her paperwork to see Henry standing triumphantly beside her desk, a completed medical examiner's report in his hands. She gave him a deadpan stare.

"_Coral?_"

"Coral! Our victim was murdered with a hyper-toxic species of coral!"

"Really, Henry? _Coral?_ You can kill someone with that?"

"Palythoa, commonly known as _limu make o Hana_ in its indigenous Hawai'i, emits one of the most poisonous zootoxins on the planet. Our victim's blood was ripe with the toxin, so ripe it had to have been given intravenously."

Jo ripped the report from his hands. She couldn't take his utter excitement about obscure forms of death, or death at all for that matter. It was too early for this.

"Wait, what victim?" She asked, scanning Henry's reports. He watched on, rocking on the balls of his feet, like a proud child waiting for approval of the hard work he'd done just for her.

"Oh, God, Henry, _tell_ me this isn't the east side apartment case," she whined, even though she knew as soon as she'd seen the file number that this was indeed the case. She held her head in her right hand, and spun the paper back at the doctor with her left.

"What would you think, Detective, of a visit to the aquarium?"

{•*•*•*•}

Within half an hour, Jo and Henry were walking through the doors of the New York Aquarium. Situated in the walls were small fish tanks of various shapes and sizes, and an even greater variety of marine life filled their waters. Henry observed the fish as the wove in and out of the plants and corals that provided landscape for their watery world, while Jo immediately made her way to the receptionist's desk.

"Good afternoon, ma'am," the college-age girl behind the desk chirped. "How can I help you?"

"Hello, yes, would it be possible for my colleague and I to meet with the, um, the keeper?" Jo asked, quickly recovering from her failure to know the proper name for an aquarium keeper (which is an aquarist, by the way). The receptionist immediately became profusely apologetic.

"I'm sorry, but Dr. Jordan doesn't take visitors. But I'm sure one of our _tank-tastic_ tour guides can answer any questions you have." she said with a slathered-on sarcastic smile.

"How much do they pay you to say that?" Jo asked in a sarcastic yet sympathetic manner. As the receptionist replied with a confused quirk of her brow, the detective pulled out her badge.

"Detective Martinez, NYPD. Your Dr. Jordan's expertise may be critical in solving a homicide."

The girl's eyes grew wide, her mouth formed an O of surprise. She blinked rapidly, her words as erratic as her eyelashes. "I... I'll ring him up. Right away."

"Thank you," obsequiously smiled the detective. She then turned around to see Henry still immersed in watching the immersed worlds of marine life.

He ran his hand along the glass. A curious clownfish swam forward and followed his finger as it traced along the panes separating his life from his mechanism of return to it.

Henry smiled to himself as a memory of decades ago flooded his mind.

_"Daddy, look at the fishies!"_

_Abe toddled over to the large tank filled with swimming creatures great and small. He slammed his little hands on the glass and watched the fish swim all around him. A school of minnows shimmered past, mesmerizing the little boy and leaving him with a sheer expression of awe on his youthful face._

_From behind, Henry swooped his arm around the three-year-old and held him on his hip. Abe wrapped an arm around his father's neck and reached forward with the other to point to the minnows._

_"Fishies!"_

_"Yes, Abraham," Henry laughed along with his son, "those fish are called minnows."_

_"Min-no!" The boy sounded out, smiling triumphantly at his father. Abe reached forward again, pulling against Henry's hold as he strained for the fish. Henry conceded to his little boy's desires and held him closer to the glass and the frolicking fishies._

"Henry?"

Jo looked over her shoulder at him, waving him forward to follow her. "C'mon."

Henry took one last quick look around the lobby, then began to follow Jo. They made their way into an employees-only office space, down a few corridors, or rather, through cubicle-formed corridors, until reaching a much more permanent office space with a placard declaring its possession by the marine biologist.

As Jo raised her hand to knock, the door swung open and a man introduced himself as Dr. Jordan and kindly welcomed the two into the space. He was in his mid fifties, so suggested by his almost all-gray hair and his skin's faint wrinkled canvas. His large palms were marred with a few scars.

Jo and Henry settled in the two chairs across from his desk, and Jordan returned to his elite workstation. Folding his hands in a businesslike manner, he asked, "What can I do for you today, detectives?"

His rich, full voice came as a surprise to Jo, but not to Henry. He had looked familiar from somewhere, and at the moment Jordan spoke, Henry had his answer. His voice was very similar to that of a fellow doctor the immortal had once known about a century earlier. Likely this Jordan was a descendant of that Jordan, but asking so would be futile and utterly pointless.

"We are investigating a homicide, and the victim appears to have been murdered with some sort of biological toxin." Jo explained. "We were wondering if you could tell us more about it, perhaps whether or not the species is on display here, or if there is anywhere that the average person could get their hands on... What was it again, Henry?"

"_Limu make o Hana_," Henry offered, in almost an offhand way. His focus was on studying the diplomas behind the doctor's desk, trying to shed some light on whether or not the man was his former colleague's descendant.

Jordan's eyes lit up. "Ah, the Seaweed of Death from Hana. A very interesting coral. Hawaiian legends states that the species was a curse brought upon the village of Hana after a fisherman failed to make a catch. It resembles seaweed if washed up on shore and its toxin, palytoxin, is potent enough to cause death within twelve hours."

"It attacks the muscular tissues," Henry continued, a faraway look in his eyes. "Breaking them down very rapidly, causing leakage of cellular contents and the bloodstream, leading to myocardial infarction, better known as a heart attack,"

Jo and Jordan looked at Henry with dumbfounded expressions; wondering why the detective and the doctor had needed to come to Jordan for confirmation when they had Henry's knowledge at their disposal.

"Yes..." Jordan said slowly, nodding along with Henry's explanation. Turning back to Jo, "It seems you already have your expert, Detective."

Henry repositioned himself in the chair, crossing his legs in the shape of the number 4, so he more comfortably faced the aquarist. "I may know the power of palytoxin, but what I do not know is the availability of it. Where could someone come across this coral and collect its venom is what the detective and I are here to discover."

Henry continued to lean forward, prodding Jordan to respond merely by his forward posture. Jo quickly joined Henry in the slightly inquisitive lean. Jordan tapped his fingertips on the surface of his mahogany desk, very methodically and deliberately.

"We do have Palythoa on exhibit here in the aquarium. Direct access to them is strictly patrolled due to their potency, only myself and a handful of our most senior aquarists are authorized to handle them and their tank. I could get you a list of those people," Jordan offered, lilting the last syllable as if he were asking a question.

"That would be great, thank you." Jo replied. Before she'd even agreed to take the list, Jordan was opening a file on his computer screen and typing up the names. The document came out of the printer, still warm and the ink still drying on the sheet.

"I can't believe that any of my employees would do something so unethical and criminal as murder." Jordan mused as he handed the list to Jo.

"It wouldn't necessarily have to be one of your own, Dr. Jordan, if there is another market in which our killer could have obtained the coral."

"See, that's the thing. Palythoa are quite commonly available in the home market, but Palythoa that have grown to the size necessary to provide enough toxin to kill a human being would have to have been raised by someone with a marine educational background or a reefing hobbyist. Your killer, whoever it is, has to be well-versed in reefkeeping."

{•*•*•*•*•}

After their successful trip to the aquarium, Jo and Henry parted ways; she to the computer and databases of information and he to the morgue and Lucas' secondary examination of the body. In the earlier autopsy, Henry had indeed determined that the toxin had been given intravenously, but had not pinpointed the injection site.

"Hey, Doc, check out what I found on Jenny!"

Lucas ran up to Henry before he'd even had a chance to close the morgue's doors. His eyes sparkled with the excitement of discovery and the pride of finding something his mentor and hero had not.

Henry pushed the door shut and pulled his scarf from where it had been caught in the crack. He looked up at Lucas, confusion crossing his features.

"Jenny? Who is Jenny, Lucas?"

"The coral girl. Her name's Jennifer Welsh." He explained, rushing his words. "C'mon, Doc, you _have_ to see this!"

Lucas grabbed Henry's arm and pulled him across the room to the autopsy table. Jenny's body lied atop the slab, only her right hand and head out from under the covering. Her springy caramel-colored hair floated around her head like some sort of providential halo, making it seem all the more that she was asleep rather than deceased. Lucas lifted her right hand and placed it in Henry's own.

"Wait a moment, Lucas," the doctor commanded, setting Jenny's hand back on the slab. "How did you discover this woman's identity?"

"Oh. While you and Jo were at the aquarium, Hanson went to some reefkeeping stores and showed her picture around. The one owner recognized her, said she was Jenny Welsh, and she went in there all the time. Hanson ran the name and brought up her drivers license and stuff, then called the ID down here to me, well actually, to you, but you weren't back yet, so I told him I'd just tell you. Now _please_ just look at her hand!"

Lucas put the hand back in Henry's palms. He stretched the fingers just a little more beyond the position they'd frozen in a few hours after her death, pulling the skin of her palm taut against the hand's inner workings.

"If you look right below her ring finger, you'll see your entry point for the toxin. Not an injection..."

"A papercut." Henry finished, observing the deadly dermal damage. "The placement makes sense. I thought the swelling on her ring finger was a reaction to this clearly cheap gold-substitute ring, but it is explained by the toxin's proximity. The nearest extremity to the entry point would have swelled a bit from the sheer amount of toxin it was exposed to."

Henry set the hand back on the slab and turned to his assistant. "Brilliant work, Lucas."

Lucas waited until Henry had turned away to allow his grateful smile to completely fill his face. And only when the doctor returned to his office did Lucas allow himself the luxury of a victory dance across the morgue.

{•*•*•*•*•}

Jo had narrowed the list of suspects to six people. Then again, the list Jordan had provided included only six names, including his own.

This was hopeless. None of the suspects had a tie to the apartment or the victim, of whose name she had been informed as soon as she re-entered the homicide division.

She had spent the majority of the past few hours scanning through the legal documents concerning her suspects. All upstanding citizens, graduates from prestigious universities who had earned prestigious titles, a home, a family, a couple cars to their names. The worst offense committed by any of the six involved either speeding or parking tickets. Petty traffic violations that dotted almost everyone's records, nothing to pinpoint a possible murderer.

Jo was just about to shut down her computer and call it a day when the phone on her desk began to ring.

"Martinez," she quipped, wondering who was even in the office this late to have called her from the inter-office system.

"You're investigating the Jenny Welsh case, right?"

"Yeah..." She replied cautiously. The voice on the other end was completely unfamiliar. Definitely masculine, a bit gravelly, the pronunciations of the r's just a little too forced, as if he were disguising an accent. "Who is this?"

"You don't have the killer on your suspect list, Jo."

Jo grasped the receiver even tighter, fear and apprehension coursing through her veins. The only people who had seen that list besides herself were Henry, Hanson, and Dr. Jordan. Jordan had no access to inter-office, Hanson had left hours earlier for his son's Cub Scout meeting, and Henry was way too serious to even allow a prank call to cross his mind.

Jo pulled the phone's cord as she strained toward the wall, to the light switch. The phone's base slid across her desk, but she was able to reach the switch and illuminate the room. Discovering that she was indeed completely alone in the room brought no comfort, only more worry.

"I'm going to ask you again, who are you and how do you know the suspect list?"

Her tone was no-nonsense, sharp as a knife and more demanding than a drill sergeant.

"That, my dear, is entirely inconsequential. Suffice it to say that a little birdie, whether that be myself or not, will guide you to you killer. As for me, I am what I am: a simple anonymous caller."

The line went dead.

* * *

><p><em>hello everyone! This is a new approach to Forever fics for me; I hope you all like it! My plan is for it to be in a format more like an actual episode of the show, centered around a case, flashbacks here and there, and what's Forever without an anonymous caller? This will be a three-case series, not necessarily three parts, probably two or three parts to a case, and they are going to build on each other. I had a lot of fun, and am still having fun, doing the research for this as well!<em>

_1)Palythoa and palytoxin is a real thing. The idea for the murder came from a firsthand experience of an aquarium keeper who came close to dying after getting the toxin in a small cut on her hand._

_2)I felt really smart discovering the official scientific name for a heart attack. And yes, women are actually more likely to die from a heart attack than men, mainly because doctors can recognize a heart attack better in males than in females._

_Thank you all for joining me on this new journey; where it will lead us still I don't know! (So don't expect another installment for a while.)_


	2. Chapter 2

Jo stood outside the shop, leaning on the support pillar holding the building's front corner, and sipped the coffee she'd bought down the street. She'd lived her whole life in this city and still she found new coffee shops to sample. This one, she had to admit, likely wouldn't be getting her business again.

It was the morning after the anonymous call, and the eerie voice had left her skittering at every noise she heard, whether out on the streets or inside the walls of her home. She was in fact very tempted to just hop back in the safety of the cruiser instead of waiting here in the dangerous outside for Henry to match his scarf with his shoes or whatever fashion ritual he had that took longer than the average woman's.

"Good morning, Detective," Henry smiled as he at last exited the shop's door. He stepped off of the porch and began walking alongside her, as close as he could without actually initiating physical contact. He could tell she was on edge about something, the way she flicked her eyes all around before setting off, the tension in her calves as she walked, the firm grasp on her fragile styrofoam coffee cup. Her posture screamed for the touch of a hand, an arm around her shoulder, some sort of physical contact that would make her feel safe, but Henry was much too afraid of what that contact may mean for their nice, slightly-non-platonic friendship.

He said nothing, she said nothing. Together but apart they walked the three blocks from Henry and Abe's place to the apartment where the body of Jenny Welsh was found. A flash of Jo's badge gave them access to the building, a key to the room, and a few curious glances.

Jo fit the key in the lock and cracked open the door. The duo was greeted by a magazine-ready room setup. The main room was a wide-open space fulfilling the purpose of all traditional first-floor rooms. Its ubiquitous ivory; floors, ceilings, walls; imitated the tortured serenity of the Aterna clinic. To the left was a kitchen, stainless steel appliances shimmering as they obstructed the sun's light from reaching the floors. Behind the kitchen, the winding treads of a wide spiralled staircase could be seen. A very square onyx leather couch was the centerpiece of the living room side, with walnut end tables and patterned chairs mirrored on either side. And as every modern home is not home without, a ridiculously large, ridiculously flat television screen stared blankly back at the seating. It looked perfect. Too perfect.

"Nice place," Jo commented, crossing the threshold. Henry made no move to agree or disagree. He scanned the minimalist furnishings, eyes narrowing as he honed in on something only he understood.

"There." He knelt beside a round walnut end table, his eyes level with its surface. He slipped on a blue latex glove and extended a finger to the surface, carefully examining his fingertip after he touched the tabletop.

"What is it, Henry?" Jo asked in a sort of curious but mostly doubtful manner.

"Water. Salt water." Henry rose from the table, his hand extended out to Jo as if she could actually see the minute particles of salty residue on his fingertip. "The palythoa had to have come from somewhere in this apartment."

With that deduction, the medically-astute modern Sherlock walked away and began exploring the apartment's other rooms, leaving Jo alone in the multipurpose entry space. When she didn't hear the echo of his footsteps any longer, she also knelt to the table and observed the dried saltwater. Or, at least she tried to. No matter how carefully she looked, she saw nothing.

The vibration of her phone both startled her, but offered an excuse to stop pretending to look for evidence she couldn't see in the first place. She pulled the iPhone from her back pocket, checking the caller ID to make sure she wouldn't receive another chilling communication from an unknown entity.

_Mike Hanson_, flashed the screen. The caller's identity confirmed as one she actually knew, Jo slid the little green phone across the screen and offered a hello.

"Hey Jo," Hanson's voice came through the line. Or lack thereof. "You out somewhere with Henry?"

"Yeah, we went out to the apartment before coming in for the day, seeing as it's close to Henry's place and all."

"And what were _you_ doing last night, Detective?"

Jo scoffed at Hanson's intimate intimation. "We met up _this morning_, like an hour ago. If I had actually been there all night, do you think I'd be drinking this crappy of a cup of coffee?" Jo picked up the cup, as though her official partner could see it, and took a swig of the ground-bean flavored water. She winced at the tepid taste as it traveled down her tongue. It would've been more realistic to say she was swallowing medicine than drinking the breakfast staple of the workforce.

"God, it's worse cold," she choked out. As soon as she and Henry left this place, that coffee was going in the trash.

"Alright, I believe you," Hanson acquiesced. "Don't kill yourself over it."

"I'll try not to," she bantered back. "So what were you actually calling me about?"

"We contacted Jennifer's next of kin this morning. Her parents are coming in around ten to ID the body. So if you and, more importantly, the ME, can be back here by then, that'd be great."

{•*•*•*•*•}

Upstairs, Henry continued to explore every nook and cranny of the apartment. He had explored the first bedroom and its closet, and now stood in the second bedroom's closet, studying up and down the walls.

A dark spot on the closet floor caught his eye. Henry knelt to the floor and, putting on his glove again, carefully pulled the object from underneath the baseboard.

It was a small feather. Thin, ebony strands flared out from the blue-black core. The surface shimmered as though it were wet. Henry rubbed his thumb and forefinger together across the feather and watched the liquid slowly ooze off into his fingers.

There was something amiss with this. Something acutely amiss. Henry put the feather into a small evidence baggie, careful to avoid touching his bare skin to the oily surface. With the feather sealed safely away and waiting for its examination, Henry continued to survey the upstairs rooms.

"Find anything?"

Henry jumped at the sound of human speech behind him. He turned from his analysis of the sink top to see Jo leaning up against the door, still casually holding her hated cup of coffee in her right hand.

"Ah, no. Nothing pertinent, anyhow." The doctor shrugged.

Henry stepped out of the bathroom and began walking down the hall, Jo falling in step with him as he crossed the threshold.

"What did you find?" She asked again, in commensurate casualness as she had before, looking up at him from the corner of her eye.

He turned his head to her, cocking it ever so slightly upward in that way he tends to turn it when making a point. "A feather."

"Oh." Jo at first thought it as insignificant as had Henry. He pulled the baggie out of his pocket and showed her the oily onyx threads ornithological in origin. A synapse fired in her brain. The caller. A break in the case involving a "little birdie."

Henry took back the feather encased in flexible plastic. He tucked it into his pocket, turned up his head, and glanced curiously at the detective.

She was pale as a sheet. Her chocolate eyes stared dazedly ahead, her blinking was slowed, her face itself looked tensed back.

"Are you alright, Jo?" Henry gently asked. He began to move his hand toward her shoulder as a gesture of comfort but quickly retracted it.

"I..." She stared still ahead, in the daze. She made a motion to speak, then blinked harshly, literally shaking her head to shake herself from the miniature coma. "Yeah, no, I'm fine, Henry."

"_Jo_."

"I'm _fine_, Henry. Really." She continued to brush it off. "C'mon, we've got to get back down to the precinct."

{•*•*•*•*•}

"She always loved the ocean."

The woman sighed, a plaintive smile both on her lips and in her eyes.

"Every time we went to the beach, it took all we had to drag her back to the hotel at the end of the day. God, what I wouldn't give..."

She paused to swallow the lump in her throat, pulling a Kleenex from the box on Henry's desk and dabbing at the crow-footed corners of her eyes. The man beside her wrapped his arm around her shoulders and gave them a commiserating squeeze.

As much as Jo, Henry, and Hanson wanted to keep the conversation moving and get a step closer to wrapping up their case, they all, Jo and Henry especially, knew the wrenching pain of losing a loved one. They took it slowly, allowing for Jenny's parents to grieve. And as always in these moments, their own memories of love and loss began to play at the corners of their minds…

_Henry slipped into the back of the church, taking a seat in the furthest pew, furthest corner from the pulpit. He needed to be here. No matter what had happened, no matter how it had ended, he still loved her._

_But it was difficult. He couldn't be seen by anyone, at least not anyone occupying the front half of the church. The family might recognize him, and with the way she'd reacted to his secret, he didn't even want to know what they would do these twenty-five years later._

_A priest rose from the corner, his all-white uniform a stark contrast to the ebony of mourning filling the pews. Behind him sat another, uncannily familiar, Father. it seemed as if the man were staring right at him. Henry averted his eyes, then looked back up again as the first priest began to speak_

"_Brothers and sisters, family and friends, children and grandchildren, we are gathered here today to honor the life and memory of Nora Elizabeth Morgan."_

_The service was short, sweet, beautiful, and it reflected his wife-late wife-so perfectly. The soft melodies of the organ, both melancholy yet peppered with hope, the lilacs-her favorite flower-laid one by one on the casked by each member of the family. It broke his heart and warmed it at the same time. There they were, so close, yet so far. His children, their children, all grown up and with little ones of their own. _

_He longed with all of his being to run up to them, arms wide open, and at long last embrace them again. He wanted to be able to mourn with them, to be their comfort, to be the rock holding the drifting family to shore. _

_He wanted to be their father again._

_After the services, the mourners filed out to the gravesite. Next to the empty plot that still bore his name, a fresh hole was dug, dirt mounded beside. The pallbearers carried the casket out and slowly lowered it into the grave. Henry stood back from the crowd, slowly dying inside every second more he was denied his right to mourn at his wife's funeral. _

_The casket settled in the dirt, and family and friends came around to give their condolences to the grieving. Henry held back, afraid of what his children would think of who he was. But he was inextricably glued to the spot, he could not, would not leave until he was able to properly say goodbye._

_Henry felt a hand in his shoulder and turned to see the priest standing next to him. Not the man who had preached the funeral service, but the second priest, the man he'd made eye contact with at the beginning of the funeral. _

_"She was your wife." The priest stated as fact._

_"Yes, she was, Father. Thank you."_

_Both Henry and the priest knew that the thanks offered were not for the comfort extended at the loss of a beloved, although that was surely part of it. He referenced a time twenty-three years prior, when an incarcerated priest condoned suicide because he believed, rightly so, in his cellmate's immortality._

_"Here." The priest laid a lilac stem in Henry's hand. "Go."_

_Henry hesitantly stepped forward, up to the broken earth where the lifeless body of his beloved Nora lied sealed away for eternity. He closed his eyes, tightened his grip on the lilac stem, and breathed his final greeting to her through their petals before adding the flower to the pile his children and grandchildren had placed on the casket's lid._

_"I love you, Nora. I'm so sorry I let you go to your grave without telling you so one more time. I love you, I forgive you, and I will always love you."_

"I know this is hard to deal with, but is there anyone you can think of that wanted to harm your daughter?"

Henry blinked himself back to the twenty-first century as Jo asked the Welshes the unimaginable - that perhaps someone intentionally wanted to kill their daughter.

"No, not at all." Jenny's father offered, still stroking his wife's shoulder as she mourned. "Jenny wasn't the type to have enemies. At least," he paused, turning to his wife. They shared a melancholy look before he continued. "At least, not that we know of."

Now it was Jo and Henry sharing the glance, a furtive, interest-piqued glance. Hanson took no time to silently confer with his fellow detectives (albeit one not officially a detective) and asked the first question that came to mind.

"Your daughter was in the city for college, right?" A nod from the deceased's parents. "Do you know of any friends, classmates of hers we could talk to?"

"Her roommate. Saralynn Rhodes. They've lived together since freshman year." her mother sighed, likely overwhelmed with memories. Henry understood. He remembered seeing that same faraway look in Abigail's eyes after they had dropped Abe off at Berkeley, and he would be in denial if he didn't admit to the overwhelming happiness/sadness of watching your child spread his wings and fly. He couldn't imagine how much more the heartbreak was amplified by a senseless murder.

"I just can't believe anyone would want to hurt our little girl…"

{•*•*•*•*•}

The trio of Jo, Henry, and Hanson went their separate ways at the conclusion of he interview. Henry was back out in the lab double-checking some dubious details of an autopsy performed by Dr. Washington and Hanson was scrounging through the system for information on this Saralynn Rhodes, leaving Jo to muddle through what information she had available about Jenny's school. They were waiting for the powers that be to issue them the legal document necessary to access the university's files, but nothing said she couldn't do a little detecting on their public websites.

She sat down at her desk and logged onto the desktop, sliding her rising pile of cases to the side, but not before placing the slightly more filled Welsh folder on top. As she was waiting for the spinning blue wheel of death to stop turning, her desk phone rang.

"Found her already, Mike?" Jo answered, not even checking the caller ID.

"So you've found out about Saralynn."

Jo's breath caught in her throat. It was the chilling, casual coolness of the anonymous caller's voice coming through the line. Her hand shot out and slapped a button on the phone's cradle to trace the number and its location.

"Good. She'll be a nice asset. Not before throwing quite the wrench in your case, though."

Her mind went completely blank. Every time she tried to verbalized a reply, it got lost in neural transmission and came out as a crackly sort of croak. As it has the night before, her grip tightened on the phone to hide the tremors of fear the anonymous caller sent racing through her veins.

"And don't bother tracing this call, Detective. Two words: burner phone."

The line went dead.

{•*•*•*•*•}

"The victim was clearly asphyxiated! Do you not see those ligature markings, Lucas? They are most definitively indicative of a cutoff of airflow to the lungs!"

Henry took a deep breath and, through gritted teeth in an abrupt, choppy manner, released it. He stepped away from the slab to allow his assistant a closer look at the misdiagnosed cause of death. Lucas crouched down to a more eye-level plane and squinted at the markings on the man's skin.

"I cannot have these sort of crucial mistakes made in my laboratory, do you understand me?"

Lucas turned his head up from the victim to see his boss pacing about the lab floor, hands folded behind his back.

"I tried to tell him. Honest, Doc. Dr. Washington just doesn't listen to me. Or any of the techs," he shrugged apologetically.

"I apologize, Lucas," Henry stopped pacing. "For laying the blame of these egregious diagnoses upon you. I should have learned by now the lack of appreciation Dr. Washington has for the skills of others and his reliance on a pompous certainty of his own less-than-perfect examinations for proper diagnosis."

The two men covered the body and moved to put it back in the cooler, Lucas leading the cart as Henry idly pushed it along while making furious notations in the John Doe's case file.

"So I'm off the hook?" Lucas asked with a hopeful smile as he and Henry lifted the body onto its assigned shelf and slid it back into the cooler. Henry replied with a shake of his head, which seemed a negatory reply, but was simply him still showing his annoyance toward the "more senior" doctor.

"Just let me know when Dr. Washington makes another mistake that could make or break a case, alright, Lucas?"

"Sure," nodded the assistant absently. He wasnt exactly sure where the conversation was going to go, and as much as he disliked Washington, he was his superior after all; he couldn't bash the man's admittletly below-par work for all that long. So Lucas welcomed the ring of the phone that likely meant a new case was on its way. Nothing got Henry out of his brooding moods like a dead body.

"Office of the Medical Examiner, Dr. Wahl speaking,"

Lucas looked to Henry for approval. He'd been harping him on the causal way he answered the office's telephone, even if it was inter-office and everyone who would call that number would know who he was and what he meant by "ME's, you've got Lucas." Henry caught his look and gave a nod of approval.

"Good _afternoon_, Dr Wahl?" Hanson replied dubiously, mimicking Lucas' forced formality. "If you wouldn't mind loosing Hen-I mean, _Dr. Morgan_-to the scene of a crime, that'd be great."

"Just a sec." Lucas put the phone on his shoulder and looked up to where Henry had been standing. The doctor was already in his office, lab coat off, trenchcoat on, and with as much sass as he could muster, flipping a scarf about his neck. Properly scarved, he left the glass-walled inner office and, with a nod to Lucas, exited the morgue. The assistant put the phone back to his ear and slowly replied to the detective.

"He is… already out the door."

{•*•*•*•*•}

The sky was blue, the clouds were white, the grass was green. Excepting, of course, the portion stained the rusty brown-red of blood.

"Likely from an abrasion to this healing wound," Henry observed, lifting the corpse's arm. He traced a scar along her wrist with his finger. "I'd say the wound came from a razor, likely self-harming in nature, and a tactic used by the killer to persuade our fine forces into believing this was a suicide."

"But you said it was self-harm," Jo spoke, her confusion revealed by her hesitant wording.

"I'm no medical expert, Doc, but doesn't self-harm mean ya do it, oh, I dunno, to yourself?" Hanson asked in his more sarcastic manner.

"Indeed it does, Detective," Henry continued, rising back up from the corpse on the lawn. "But from what I can see of her other wounds, this woman's cutting was not intended to be more than slight dermal damage. The other wounds go no deeper than barely through the epidermis, the first skin layer, and would have bled slightly and scabbed over within a short time. The wound in question bears signs of the same style of slice, if I may, as the others, suggesting this was a controlled ritual of non-suicidal self-harm, or NSSH for people too lazy to say complete words. Only our killer realized that reopening one of these wounds may allow him to get away with the killing, thus he took a sharp object, say, a knife, and sliced into the wound, allowing blood to flow out and onto the ground, but not until after death. Of course, I'll have to study the body in more detail at the lab to have a conclusive result, but I can say with utmost certainty that the exsanguination from the wrist wound is not what killed this woman."

Jo flicked her eyes toward the body, then back to Henry. "So what _did_ kill her?"

"I'm not quite sure," Henry mused, looking down at the young feminine face so innocent even in death. He quickly shook himself from his wandering memories, although he wasn't sure which century they were flying back toward.

"You want the good news or the bad news?"

Hanson interrupted the two, holding a slightly bloodstained Vera Bradley wallet between his latex-gloves fingers.

"CSI's found it next to the body," he explained. "Now, good or bad? You gotta pick one."

"In that order is fine, Detective." Henry replied, cocking his head slightly to the side in his signature listening/thinking pose. Jo nodded an agreement; Hanson opened the paisley wallet.

"Good news, we've got ID. Bad news..."

He pulled out the woman's driver's license, a Vermont-issued plastic card complete with age, address, and photo ID, par usual. Jo and Henry stared dumbfounded at the information in front of them, Jo all the more so from her anonymous call not two hours ago. She barely managed to stammer out the words without thinking that she had spoken to a cold-blooded killer on her office phone.

"She's Saralynn Rhodes."

_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_

_ayenn: my headcanon is that Henry and Nora had children. Hence why Henry sees his children and grandchildren at the funeral flashback._

_thanks for your patience with my wiring this! I'm trying to write more for each chapter, more substance, more development, more science (albeit science was lacking here...)_


	3. Chapter 3

_Previously in Papercuts..._

_A young woman mysteriously suffers a heart attack in an apartment owned by one of the powers-that-be in the NYPD. Henry traces the woman's demise to not natural causes but a toxic species of coral. He and Jo interview a marine biologist for more information. Upon their return to the morgue, Lucas informs Henry of the woman's identity, Jenny Welsh, and shows the doctor a papercut on her hand-the entry point of the poison. Meanwhile, Jo receives an ominous and anonymous call concerning the case._

_The next day, Henry and Jo return to the crime scene to look for clues overlooked the day prior. Henry discovers a glossy ebony feather, which makes Jo uneasy. The duo returns to the morgue and, along with Hanson, interview Jenny Welsh's parents. They are given a lead to her roommate, Saralynn Rhodes. Jo receives a second anonymous call and soon afterward she, Hanson, and Henry are called away to a crime scene, where they discover the body of Saralynn Rhodes._

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Lucas, what do you see here?"

Henry stood beside the slab, looking up at his assistant with his head cocked slightly to the side in his analytical pose.

"Uhm… a dead girl?" Lucas replied dubiously.

Lying between them was the relatively untouched body of Saralynn Rhodes. She still wore the loose flowered blouse and khaki slacks in which she had been found. Her raven-black hair, artificially straight, as Henry presumed from the copious split-ends, a stark contrast to her pale skin, both in death and likely in life, lay flat on either side of her head, the ends just barely touching her shoulders. The large incision on her wrist was still surrounded in dried blood, but less grisly now that it wasn't lying in a pool of the vermillion liquid.

Henry sighed, rolling his eyes and hoping to whatever higher power deigned he live forever that Lucas was being sarcastic. Hope said yes, experience begged to differ.

"What do you notice _about_ the victim?"

"Well, she has scars on her arms, and it looks to me like most of the blood loss came from that one that got ripped open again."

"So you would likely assume that this is a case of death by exsanguination then, am I correct?"

"Well, yeah… I mean, that is the usual placement of a suicidal slit to the wrist. A little deep, but… y'know, she was probably nervous…"

Lucas looked over at his boss, whose face was lighting up with some sort of discovery. One he'd already likely made, the way the round of questioning was going.

"And there, Lucas, is the fault in our killer's logic!" Henry declared to begin the famed a-ha moment. Lucas, having thought they were on the same page, a page with no content beyond the word suicide, was befuddled by his boss's theory.

"Our… killer?"

"Yes, Lucas. This is no suicide; it was murder. Observe the blood pooling in the back, right side. She was lying at a fifteen degree vector on an incline, hence at death the blood ran according to gravity-"

"But if the slice on her wrist was the COD, the blood would've _left_ her body and not pooled _in_ her body!" Lucas declared in an a-ha moment of his own.

"Precisely," Henry continued with a slight smirk and a raise of his brow. "The killer did not reopen our victim's self-inflicted wound until after she was already dead, hence the deeper incision in order to draw out what blood was left in the limb. Which leads us back to the question, what really happened to Saralynn Rhodes?"

The doctor left Lucas to ponder his question while he went into his office to retrieve the tools of his gruesome trade. Henry returned and rolled out the leather-bound kit for the surgery of the dead; Lucas immediately took the scissors and sliced cleanly through her clothing. Finding nothing of interest on her skin, the duo began delving deeper into the autopsy.

"I'm pretty sure healthy muscles aren't supposed to look like that," Lucas commented, leaning over Henry's shoulder as he opened the body. Henry, completely agreeing with him, cut a small sliver of the muscle out of the chest and set it aside for a more detailed examination.

"It looks as if all of her muscles contracted simultaneously," Henry mused, holding the piece of pectoral up to the light.

"So maybe a seizure of some sort?"

Lucas and Henry continued to peer at the thick muscular fibers frozen in their stress position by death. In fact, Lucas was still gazing at where the fibers had been held up even after Henry laid them down on the slab beside the body.

"Lucas,"

The assistant jumped, literally, out of his daze. His words, however, were not so quick to return. "Yes, wha- oh, hi, Doc." And after a pause made to feel longer by Henry's disapproving glare, "Sorry."

"Your daydreams are forgiven, Lucas. Now, if you would please retrieve my cranial saw, I believe we may be one step closer to finding our killer."

{*****}

"Any clues ye-oh, God, Henry,"

Henry turned to the detectives, an equal look of surprise on his face as of disgust on theirs. He quickly placed the brain he had just removed from the victim's skull in a plastic container, draped a sheet over the open cranium, and removed his gloves that were dripping with cerebrospinal fluid.

"My apologies, detectives. I didn't see you coming in, otherwise I would have saved that extraction for later." Noting that the look of disgust on Jo and Hanson's faces had yet to disappear, Henry slid the brain bowl behind the body and covered the gaping skull with a blue sheet.

"Why did I just see you pull the victim's brain out of her skull?" Hanson asked, his tone and expression still pained by the disturbing sight he'd walked in upon.

"Very simple logic, Detective. I believe this woman was poisoned." Henry declared with that air of confidence he, rightly so, possessed.

"Can't you just do a blood test for that?"Jo inquired dubiously. She took a step forward as she spoke, and Henry took a step in front of the body in order to make her fully comfortable in the environment again; he could tell she was slowly relaxing with each move he made to cover the zombie-like extraction.

"Not for a neurotoxin. Our victim's muscles were contracted in a stress position, as if she had experienced a seizure. Yet the medical records you so graciously gave to me earlier this afternoon had no notation of any disorder she may have had or any medication prescribed to her that could cause such a muscular reaction. The most probable cause, therefore, would be either drug abuse, which I cannot yet rule out completely, or a deliberate neurotoxic poisoning. No matter which of those two were the cause of the fatal seizure, the best place to look for the compound would be within the neural tissue."

"Of course, to cover all the bases, I have sent a sample of what blood remained in the victim's system to the toxicology department, on the off-chance that I would be mistaken in my initial diagnosis." He added as a casual afterthought, even relaxing his body so that he leaned on the slab, partially supporting himself with his left arm behind his back. He was being arrogant about it, but the way he said it, with that half-smirk on his face, made his words more of a childlike pride than intentional self-elevation.

"Well then," began Jo, shifting her feet with the nervous tension Henry hadn't managed to alleviate, and turned to Hanson. "We should be going. Don't want to hold up your brain-picking." This directed to Henry with a forced smile that he attributed to the bad pun although it was nothing of the sort.

"Not that you need to pick anyone else's brain with that gift for instant diagnosis you have there," Hanson joked. "Just don't go rogue and make any shakes with that stuff. We wanna keep you around, don't go dying on us trying to live forever with some new-and-improved Aterna bull."

"Trust me, Detective," Henry replied with a knowing smirk and a secretive laughter in his eyes, "I would never fall for such a preposterous and utterly dangerous scam."

As the detectives left the room and the door swung shut, leaving Henry alone with only the mindless corpse for company, he whispered the silent and ever-present truth he couldn't finish the sentence with when anyone else was around.

"For I am the only soul who doesn't need it."

{*****}

_This was too easy._

_Easy, to him, meant boring. Sure, this wasn't the most novel way to murder; in fact, he felt he'd been quite creative in his choices of weapon. No, it wasn't the means that were bothering him. It was the method._

_It was cliche. Find a woman, preferably young, trick her into trusting you, kill her. It had been done all too many times before. It was a pattern. A predictable pattern._

_And predictable killers always get caught._

_Well, then. He'd just have to switch it up._

{*****}

"We're sorry, but we have no record for that phone number. Please check the number and try again."

The only message on her desk phone, and the most trite recording at that. But she couldn't stop thinking about it, not for a moment.

Every time her phone rang, every time _any_ phone rang, part of her jumped to grab it and the other half shirked at having to hear yet again the voice of a psychopath.

It was infuriating. The killer himself was calling her, actually speaking with her, and she could do nothing about it. She had no name, no address, nothing to go by except for an accent that no matter how obviously falsified it was, sent chills down her spine.

Jo had failed to notice the gradual darkness descending over the bullpen, the gradual quieting of the air around her as cop after cop clocked out for the day. She was trying her best to busy her mind with other things, other cases, more mundane, typical cases that didn't have their solution close enough to taunt her yet stay just out of reach.

As she scoured the intranet for the perpetrator of a burglary-gone-bullet frenzy, her eyes flicked to the time in the corner of her screen, and only then did she realize it was more dawning on nine than it was just after eight. Yeah, she should probably be getting home now.

So she powered down her desktop and organized her files in her mind whilst leaving them helter-skelter across the desk. Her bag in one hand and the other on the light switch, she was just about to leave the room when it happened.

But it wasn't her desk phone this time. It was her cell.

She was half-tempted to just let it go to voicemail. Of course, it could just as easily be a wrong number. Or maybe her sister had finally gotten that new phone plan that she'd been talking about. Maybe, just maybe, her and Abe's constant cajoling had convinced Henry to get a phone of his own.

Who was she kidding, it was the anonymous caller.

She pressed the power button and the home button of her iPhone at the same time, saving to her camera roll an image of the caller's number for hopefully more successful tracing than the last time. Then her thumb reached up to tap the little green phone on the screen, more forcefully that she had intended, for the plasma layers of screen rippled like water from the spot she had touched.

"I've heard from the little birdie that your fine forces have located Saralynn. Such a shame she can't tell you anything." the caller said, his voice oozing with sarcasm. She couldn't see him, and had no inkling of what he looked like, but in that moment, Jo could so vividly imagine the malicious smile crossing his features that were she to be asked to sketch the man then and there, she could have done it without hesitation.

"I don't know who you are and I don't know what kind of game you think you're playing, but this is the NYPD and if you think we won't find you and bring this to justice, you're horribly mistaken."

"Oh, I'm flattered by the effort, Jo, but you won't find me. And you shouldn't try. It would be a better use of the fine citizens' tax dollars to try to find this evasive serial killer. We don't want to be getting sloth about the investigation, now, do we?"

"Why should I trust you?" Jo's sharp tone cut into the phone like a knife.

"Simple, Jo. I haven't been wrong yet, have I?"

{*****}

The results were astounding. He hadn't seen anything like it before. Maybe if he had actually studied in Guam…

The murder weapon was another biotoxin, this time a potent variant of batrachotoxin. There was something off about it, it usually was derived from the poison arrow frog, but the toxin was showing traces of avian DNA instead of amphibian DNA. Very curious indeed.

And to top it off, the toxin definitively matched the glossy substance on the ebony feather he had found in the apartment. And so the web of clues grew more entangled.

Henry racked his brain for a reason that batrachotoxin would be on a bird, and, according to the condition of the feather, a bird that was still alive. Nothing would come to him. Until he let his mind return to the past...

_He knew one thing and one thing only; this was not where they were supposed to be._

_Thick jungle grew all around them, only a short stretch of sand separating vegetation from the ocean. Henry and the other men, travel-weary and seasick, slowly struggled their way to shore, the manacles holding them together not being of all that much help._

_The prisoners at last had all reached the shore and now simply sat, away from the water but not quite into the tropical green unknown, catching their breath from the ordeal they had just gone through. As they focused on the intake and exhalation of precious oxygen, one of the ship's non-incarcerated crew members came down the line of men and began unlocking their shackles. The few prisoners who took note of their freedom looked at the man in surprise._

_"This is our final destination. You are all free."_

_With that, the entire crew walked along the beach until the sunset swallowed them up, leaving the prisoners alone with only each other and a line of sturdy iron chain._

_It was a prison transport, one of the last. These men had been chosen from within the British penal system to help build up the colony of Australia. Many had gone before them, and now that the colony was beginning to open to free settlers, many would come after._

_A storm had blown the ship off course, however, and wrecked it off the coast of the island that would come to be known as New Guinea. The men slowly went their separate ways after the harrowing swim to shore, fending for themselves in the wilderness before them until help came, if at all._

_Henry was especially in despair, knowing he would be stuck here indefinitely no matter what happened save a ship returning for them. He was the last one to leave the beach, only in the cover of night did he at last move into the jungle behind. And that was where he discovered it._

_The bird. The small but majestic ebony creature with shining sunset patches on its chest. The bird that destroyed any conception he had about dangerous animals._

_It was the one and only time he lost his life to a wild animal. And he would never forget it._

"The shipwreck bird," Henry whispered in revelation. His expression of awe turned into one of determination, as he prepared a sample of the feather for testing, then began studying the shimmering-with-toxin hooks and barbs under his own microscope. He was so intently focused on the task in front of him, he didn't hear the morgue doors open or hear the authoritative click of sensibly short high heels growing louder and closer to his workstation.

"Any luck figuring out the poison yet?"

Henry jumped at the sound of Jo's voice, so close to him. He peered up at her from the corner of his eye, having barely removed them from the binocular lenses of the microscope and caught a small smile forming across her lips.

"I didn't think anything could faze you, Henry Morgan."

"You caught me off guard," he tried to explain away the embarrassment. And of course, he would then turn the tables on his partner. "What are you still doing here at work, Detective?"

Jo shifted her feet, her right hand reaching up to play with the wedding band around her neck. There was apprehension in her coffee-colored eyes, an apprehension that Henry, master of reading a life story in a single glance, couldn't quite figure out. Perhaps because he refused to see that same expression in himself no matter how clearly it was reflected in the mirror.

"I need your help with something, Henry."

"What is it, Jo?" Henry asked, gentle in both his words and the brush of his hand on her shoulder and slowly down her arm until he reached her hand. No conscious decision on either's part made them intertwine fingers yet somehow their hands were now held fully within the other's, the fit so natural and comforting that neither questioned it.

"Well…" she sighed, averting her eyes from the doctor's soul-searching gaze of selfless concern. "I've been getting some weird phone calls lately, ever since we started the Jenny Welsh case."

"Jo, we both know I don't handle these sort of things in the best manner."

She looked back up at them, the vulnerability in both of their eyes taking away the need to verbalize the fact that although he hadn't handled it properly, he had been there.

"Henry, I think this guy is the killer."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

_Sorry I haven't updated in so long! I'm losing the muse... I dunno what to do! anyway, because of the delay, I gave you that litte summary at the beginning (did you like it? well, I'm doing it every chapter now, so you better!(; ) side note: Henry's flashback was supposed to be a wayward prison ship to Australia, if that didn't make sense. idk if any of those ships got wrecked on New Guinea, but I needed him there at some point and we sure as heck know it wasn't when he (didn't) study in Guam._

_other side note: if I were to make a collection of random drabbles and oneshots and stuff (Forever, obviously), would you want to read that? I can have better luck writing random than following a storyline sometimes(:_


End file.
